The 9th Girl Read Free

women had been abducted—or their bodies had been found—always on or around a holiday, always near an interstate highway. Over the months, it had become clear that the Midwest had a serial killer cruising the highways.
    “She came out of the trunk of a car,” Liska said.
    The prevailing theory was that Doc Holiday was a long-haul trucker. The serial killer’s dream job. His chamber of horrors ran on wheels. He could snatch a victim in one city and dump her in another with no one questioning his movements. Victims were readily available all along his route.
    “So he’s a traveling salesman,” Kovac said. “I don’t care what he’s driving.”
    He cared that he was standing over another young woman who would never have the chance to become an old woman. Whoever this girl was, she would never have a career, get married, have children, get divorced. She would never have the opportunity to be successful or make a shambles of her life, because she didn’t have a life anymore.
    And no matter if she had been the perfect girl or a perfect bitch, somewhere tonight someone would be missing her, wondering where she was. Somewhere on this New Year’s Eve a family believed they would see her again. It would be Kovac’s job to tell them the hard truth. If he could manage to figure out who the hell she was.
    On the sidelines, the reporters had begun to get restless, wanting details. One of them called out, “Hey, Detective! We heard there was a zombie. Is that true?”
    Off to the southwest the sky suddenly exploded with color. Fireworks over the burbs.
    Kovac looked at his partner. “Happy freaking New Year.”

3
    “I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop the damn Hummer,” Jamar Jackson said. He had the look of a man who had seen a ghost and knew that it was going to haunt him every night for the rest of his life.
    “That thing is like driving the fucking Titanic !” he said. “You can’t just stop! I hit the brakes. It was too late. She popped out of that trunk and bam ! I just hit her. I killed her! Oh my God. I killed somebody!”
    He cupped his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the table, holding him up. He was sweating like a horse. As cold as it had been at the scene, it was equally hot in the interview room. Something had gone haywire with the heating system, and no one from the maintenance staff was answering their phones on New Year’s Day.
    Liska had stripped off two layers of clothing and she still felt like she was wearing her parka.
    Jackson had jerked loose his bow tie and opened the collar of his tuxedo shirt. It was clear he was replaying the memory of the accident in his mind over and over. Liska tried to picture it herself—driving down the road, the trunk of the car in front flies open, and like a scene from a horror movie, out pops a body.
    “What kind of car was it?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said impatiently, as if he didn’t want his macabre memory interrupted. “Black.”
    “Big? Small?”
    “Big. Kind of. I don’t know.”
    “American? Foreign?”
    “I don’t know!” he said, exasperated. “I wasn’t paying attention!”
    Liska gave him the hard Mom look. “You’re a limo driver. You’re paid to get your passengers from one place to another in one piece, and you weren’t paying attention?”
    Jackson threw his hands up in front of him. “Hey! You don’t know what was going on behind me! I got drunks, I got fights, I got half-naked women making out with each other—”
    “You were distracted.”
    “Hell yeah! You would be too!”
    “As much as the men in my life like to fantasize about it, half-naked women making out isn’t my thing,” Liska said. “So what do you remember seeing, Mr. Jackson? On the road. In front of you.”
    He heaved a sigh and looked up at the ceiling, as if the scene might play out there like a movie on a screen. “There was a truck on my left.”
    “What kind of a truck? A pickup truck?” She didn’t care about the truck.